For Heather King, food serves as an emblem of our collective longing for transcendence and communion. Food---ordinary, everyday food---is a sacrament, a mystery, and a source of unending, ever-replenishing joy.

In this highly personal series of essays---each accompanied by a comforting, inspiriting recipe---King shares her story: one of eight kids in a struggling blue-collar New England family; twenty years of hard-core drinking; a turn as a Beverly Hills attorney she quit for the perilous vocation of writing; cancer; divorce; cross-country road trips; unrequited love.

Through the essays pulses her love affair with the city and food of Los Angeles: foraged fruit, farmer's markets, the 99 Cents Only Store produce section, holiday dinners gone terribly awry, then miraculously righted.

Grounded in the notion of the shared meal as the highest form of communion, Famished revels in the discovery that the human condition is not a sickness to be healed but a paradox to be pondered, mystified by, patiently endured, and madly, eternally celebrated.

Famished is a literary and food-flecked journey through an imperfect life begun in a working-class but pancake-stacked childhood in New England. Through experiencing alcoholism's depths to her delight in faith and Asian groceries found by walking the streets of Los Angeles, King is a clear-eyed optimist.---April Fulton, founding editor of NPR's food blog, The Salt

Heather King is a memoirist and essayist with several books, among them Parched; Redeemed; Shirt of Flame; Poor Baby; Stumble; Stripped; and Loaded: Money and the Spirituality of Enough. She lives in Los Angeles, speaks nationwide, appears monthly in Magnificat, and writes a weekly arts and culture column for Angelus, the archdiocesan newspaper of LA For more info and her blog, visit Heather King: Mystery, Smarts, Laughs (heather-king.com).